Lab Work -- Commonly misconstrued to be one-man's work
Sherry is a final-year Life Sciences
student who is doing her Final Year Project (FYP) in Molecular Biology. She is
hardworking, meticulous and possesses strong analytical and investigative
skills, making her a perfect research candidate. As she has been in the same
lab for her undergraduate research stints and performed well, the Principal
Investigator (PI) of the lab assigned her to be a mentor to Ryna, an incoming
Year 3 undergraduate who is working on her UROPS, a semester-long research
project designed to let students try out research. Such arrangements are rare
and coveted as only students who have performed well enough are let on such
additional responsibilities.
Ryna is an enthusiastic learner
who learns fast but tends to be careless as she finds all short cuts possible
to solve a problem, since results rather than the process mattered for her.
Also, being an active member in many extra-curricular activities, she often had
to leave the lab early, leaving Sherry to tie up loose strings for her. When
such things happened, Sherry would be angry that she has to take on this
additional work that wasn’t meant for her to take on. Also, the PI has
structured their projects in such a way that Sherry’s progression in her
project would be dependent on Ryna’s project findings, since they are working
on a novel protein.
Their partnership soon turned sour as
problems came up one after another. For one, Ryna has no intention to put in her best for her UROPS because results
do not really matter. As long as she understands the rationale of what she’s
doing (thus she was able to take many shortcuts as she knows which steps are
redundant), she would get a good grade. Unlike her, Sherry’s FYP is heavily
dependent on generating substantial good results for her thesis. From her
previous lab experience, she understands fully the consequences of cutting
steps, even trivial ones, as those would affect the quality of results. This
made her very careful but in Ryna’s eyes, Sherry is just overly careful, and
unnecessarily so, since all of Ryna’s shortcuts worked.
As a result of Ryna’s shortcuts, her work is fraught with inaccuracies though
she claims she has done her best and has checked for all possible errors. On a
few occasions, Sherry found out that Ryna takes shortcuts when no one is
looking, yet would afterwards claim that she did everything properly. Despite
knowing this, Sherry didn’t confront Ryna on this, as she didn’t want to seem
like she doubts Ryna’s words. As this cycle repeated itself, Sherry ended up
doing double work as she does not trust the quality of results generated by
Ryna for her own project use.
To improve the situation, Sherry tried talking to and guiding Ryna
step-by-step in experiments. She also used this chance to point out to Ryna
(subtly), the importance of some steps that cannot be skipped. Sherry knows
that she cannot be there to constantly oversee Ryna. As such, whenever Ryna has
to rush off for yet another appointment, and cannot learn the proper way of
doing experiments from her, she gets upset. This further compounded the stress
and tension between them, as Sherry is increasingly doubtful of Ryna’s
abilities to commit and produce.
To Ryna, she is really putting in her best to what her tight
schedule and abilities allow her. She perceives Sherry to be overly careful
and uptight. In addition, UROPS to her is just a project she needs to take so
that her days in FYP would be easier. It is not something that she enjoys or
finds important, thus she prioritizes her tuition assignments and sports
training sessions to be of equal importance with it.
In light of their vastly different importance placed on their
own scientific project, further compounded by their negative perceptions of
each other and different work ethics, what would you suggest they do so that Ryna
would produce higher-quality work of more stringent quality such that Sherry
need not do double-work?
